When Facebook “upgraded” or “simplified” its privacy settings they removed the ability to turn off your recent activity feed (this was one update ago. I think). Now everything you do posts to your wall and the news feed. You can not opt out. If you don’t like it Facebook says you’re welcome to use the “Remove” button. Great except there is no “remove” button on any mobile version of Facebook and it’s a pain in the you-know-what to delete all of my activity every time I’m active on Facebook. I may grumble a bit every time Facebook makes an “improvement” but I adjust pretty quickly and move on. I am just not getting over this one. Every person I’ve spoken to about this has the same complaints I do. If you search the Help Center you’ll see post after post about it. You’ll see your friends complaining about it in their status updates. This is what Facebook has to say about it: Whether we display a story on your profile is now controlled by the privacy of the content itself, rather than an additional setting. For example, only people who can see both your Wall, and the Wall to which you posted
Control is an Illusion You Need to Let Go
The issue of control comes up over and over again when we talk about the online world. It recently it came up at Internet Librarian in many different ways, including: How do I stop a staff member from wasting time on Facebook? How do we control what staff are saying online? Management wants everything posted online (Twitter, Facebook, blogs etc) to go through PR. We don’t want employees to be able to access social networking sites? What about privacy? We can’t allow just anyone to post a comment without approving it first. How do we know a student is who they say they are? I have answers to all of these questions, but these questions aren’t what this is about, what they represent is, control. Or the illusion of control. The desire for control comes from fear. Fear of change, of the unknown, of doing things differently, of a situation not created by us, of taking risks. It is human nature to fear these things, it’s how we’ve survived. So is adaptation and times are changing, just as they always do, and we need to adapt. In the internet age your image/brand no longer belongs to you. It belongs to
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